The Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County in Willingboro scored the lowest in the state on a nonprofit group’s new report card on safety and preventable medical errors and accidents.

Released Tuesday by the Leapfrog Group, Lourdes’ D grade was the lowest of any of the 70 New Jersey hospitals graded.

Virtua’s two hospitals in Burlington County — Virtua Marlton in Evesham and Virtua Memorial in Mount Holly — received B and C grades, respectively, from the Washington, D.C., nonprofit.

The Deborah Heart and Lung Center in Pemberton Township is a specialty hospital and was not graded.

The grades were based on data collected and compiled under the guidance of national experts on patient safety, Leapfrog said. The scores are intended to help patients select hospitals and push them to make improvements, the group said.

“Everybody has a role improving this terrible problem with safety in American hospitals,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of the Leapfrog Group. “Consumers, patients, families of patients, employers, unions and hospitals themselves can make a difference if we resolve here to make patient safety a national priority.”

At least 180,000 people are killed every year from errors, accidents, injuries and infections in U.S. hospitals, according to the group.

Each hospital was graded based on 26 categories, ranging from the number of times foreign objects are mistakenly left inside a patient undergoing surgery, to the rate of patient falls and preventable deaths, to the staffing of intensive-care units and the percentage of times that patients received the right antibiotic.

Hospitals’ grades were first released in June and reflected mostly data from 2009 and 2010. The grades were then updated to reflect more recent information available from 2011.

Lourdes Medical Center was one of two New Jersey hospitals that were not graded in June because both were in danger of receiving failing grades and because the group wanted to wait for the most up-to-date data available before labeling them. The other hospital was the Hoboken University Medical Center.

Lourdes wound up as the only New Jersey hospital with lower than a C grade.

Alan Pope, chief medical officer for the Lourdes Health System, said the hospital is committed to patient safety and transparency, and was one of the first New Jersey hospitals to participate in the Leapfrog survey.

But Pope said the group’s grading tended to overemphasize the availability of some systems or practices rather than clinical outcomes.

“Other safety ratings organizations such as Consumer Reports have ranked (Lourdes) among the top five hospitals in the state,” he said.

Virtua Marlton’s grade remained a B after the update, but Virtua Memorial’s grade dropped from B to C.

Dr. Jim Dwyer, Virtua’s chief clinician, said the Leapfrog report card provides some useful information to patients, but he cautioned that much of the data is self-reported and not validated independently, and that grades could be skewed against some hospitals, like Virtua’s, that do not participate in the group’s surveys. Some of the data is also not timely and does not reflect recent improvements, he said.

“It does create a snapshot, but it’s not necessarily a current snapshot,” Dwyer said Wednesday after the grades were released.

He said that summing up a hospital’s safety record with a letter grade or number is difficult, and that patients should try to do as much research as possible and speak to their friends, family members and primary physician before choosing a hospital.

The New Jersey Department of Health also releases an annual report on hospital performance that provides numerical grades and data on medical error rates.

“There’s a lot of information out there, so people should do as much as they can,” Dwyer said. “At the end of the day, if they trust their physician, they can usually guide them in the right direction.”

The Leapfrog grades and data for all hospitals are available online at www.hospitalsafetyscore.org.

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